31–40 of 334 posts
It is astonishing how many of the great sci-fi writers are/were around California: Vernor, PK Dick, Ursula Le Guin, Huxley, Frank Herbert, Bradbury, Heinlein, Niven, etc. Per-capita has to be several orders of magnitude higher.
He coined the concept 'singularity' in the sense of machines becoming smarter than humans what a time for him to die with all the advancements we're seeing in artificial intelligence. I wonder what he thought about it all. >The concept and the term "singularity" were popularized by Vernor Vinge first in 1983 in an article that claimed that once humans create intelligences greater than their own, there will be a techn…
He popularized and advanced the concept, but originally it was by von Neumann.
First known person to present the idea was mathematician and philosopher Nicolas de Condorcet in the late 1700s. Not surprising, because he also laid out most ideals and values of modern liberal democracy as they are now. Amazing philosopher.
He basically invented the idea of ensemble learning (known as boosting in machine learning).
Nicolas de Condorcet and the First Intelligence Explosion Hypothesis https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1609/aimag.v40i1.2855
This guy was one of the greats. A deepness in the sky (the sequel) is one of my favourite sci fi books of all time, and even better than Fire upon the deep imo.
While Egan's idea-density is off the charts, I found Deepness in the Sky to be the most complete and entertaining hard-scifi novel. It has a lot of novel science but ensures that the reader is never overwhelmed (Egan will have you overwhelmed within the first paragraph of the first page). Highly entertaining and interesting.
I wonder what Vinge thought of LLMs. If you've read the book, Vinge had literal human LMs in the novel to decode the Spider language. Maybe he just didn't anticipate that computers could do what they do today.
A huge loss indeed.
It is astonishing how many of the great sci-fi writers are/were around California: Vernor, PK Dick, Ursula Le Guin, Huxley, Frank Herbert, Bradbury, Heinlein, Niven, etc. Per-capita has to be several orders of magnitude higher.
This guy was one of the greats. A deepness in the sky (the sequel) is one of my favourite sci fi books of all time, and even better than Fire upon the deep imo.
Thomas Nau is such a fantastic villain. Not evil for the sake of evil, but rather reasoned decisions with terrible prices.
It is astonishing how many of the great sci-fi writers are/were around California: Vernor, PK Dick, Ursula Le Guin, Huxley, Frank Herbert, Bradbury, Heinlein, Niven, etc. Per-capita has to be several orders of magnitude higher.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
"Rainbows End" is his singularity book.
I would argue that all of Vinge's longer works are about Singularitarian disasters. In Tatja we eventually figure out that Tatja herself is arguably the disaster. In Fire it was asleep in the library, and I think in Rainbows there's both Rabbit obviously and the weapon the story focuses on. You can think of the apparent survival of Rabbit as a hint of doom right at the end, like the fact R's diary is in the slush pil…
Doesn’t he deserve the black bar on top of HN?